Samantha Herold, a student at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Haslam College of Business received a $5,000 scholarship for her submission in the Womenetics Advancing Aspirations Global Scholarship essay competition. The Hon. Melanne Verveer, the first U.S. Ambassador on Global Women’s Issues, selected Herold’s essay as the competition’s grand prize winner.

Herold was one of five students awarded a scholarship as part of the competition. More than 200 applications were submitted from greater than 170 universities across 36 states. Finalists for the essay contest shared their research during a panel discussion at Womenetic’s Global Women’s Initiative Symposium in Chicago on Nov. 12.

Herold’s essay focused on preventing employee burnout among women through company implementation of targeted strategies to create supportive environments. Using her scholarship, Herold will travel to Brazil and Chile to conduct a comparative study on culture and business. She hopes to use what she learns there to advocate for workforce policy on social change and sustainability.

In her winning essay, Herold sums up the major issues facing women in the workplace. “Females are not progressing to executive positions like men are, and from what the statistics show, it is certainly not an issue of education or work ethic,” Herold writes. “If burnout is an issue that transcends gender boundaries, then it is no wonder at all why women’s aspirations to advance in business burn up in the corporate atmosphere. Businesses cannot do much to dictate what women do when they leave the office, but they can do more to provide social support and to provide an environment in which they can flourish.”

Herold, a junior majoring in supply chain and international business, has previously interned with FareShare, a London, England-based nonprofit that distributes edible food waste to underserved populations in the United Kingdom.